Alice in Chains guitar mastermind Jerry Cantrell talked about the band’s approach to vocals with the arrival of new singer William DuVall, telling Ron Hart during a recent interview:
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“Will and I are pretty much 50/50. We always have been as the band has gone on. We’re kind of interchangeable, ya know?”
That seems to be one of the big appeals to this particular version of Alice in Chains – how much the vocal harmonizing is so accentuated. How important was that aspect in choosing William?
“It was the only way the band could have continued on. We started as and continue to evolve more into a two-singer band. Layne [Staley] was a classic frontman in his own right, but he gave me the confidence to start singing more myself.
“I wrote a lot of this shit; I did then and I still do now. So I carry that with me, the language that we came up with together. And I learned a lot from that. The band has a certain sound, so when we moved on we knew we weren’t going to change much.
“When I met William when he did some tours with me and my solo band, we did some Alice stuff together and he always did a great job of it. Then when it comes to Mike [Inez, bass] and Sean [Kinney, drums] and I, that’s another reason why the band sounds so intact is the three of us are still here, too.
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“Those guys are really important to it as well; it gets overlooked a lot. Everybody always wants to talk about William and me, but those guys are really fucking important, Sean Kinney and Mike Inez.
“Also, the identity of the sound, that’s carried over as well. But back to Will and I – it’s a pilot/co-pilot situation, and either one of us could be in either seat at any time.”